Ezra Furman

A delightful mess of a record, throwing everything at the wall and seeing what stuck. Did we want to make horn-adorned early-sixties soul music pastiche (“Lousy Connection,”) day-glo oddball pop-punk (“Hark! to the Music”) or brooding Neil Young-ish Americana (“Hour of Deepest Need”)? Yes, yes and yes. It mirrors the songs themselves, which as a group are both defiant and uncertain, grasping for ways to be more free, more myself/ourselves.

We made this album fairly quickly because we had suddenly gotten some attention in Europe and wanted to keep our momentum up. Even though we didn’t quite know who we were, it was time to deliver our statement of purpose.

I’d call this a transitional album, in multiple senses of the word. I was still figuring myself out in major ways, expanding my previous dabbling in gender-non-conformity and trying to understand what it might mean, but now in front of a bunch of new fans and on the radio. It adds up to a performance charged with the electricity of the moment where everyone’s looking at you and you have no idea what you’re doing but what the hell, let’s make something happen, let’s try to connect and say something true. “I’ve got the world’s ear, I’m all f-ing mumbles,” a lyric from “Lousy Connection,” sums it up well. Or if you like, from “Ordinary Life”: “You’ve got to make it new to make it true.” That’s what we were up to, and it won us a lot of new fans.

"The music has gotten more ambitious, with crisp saxophone and percussion framing deep, slurred doo-wop backing vocals." Rolling Stone

"An enlightening journey through the mind of an outsider, but an entirely relatable one." Clash

“I was sick of this ordinary life… you’ve gotta keep it new to keep it true”, Ezra explains on acoustic glam anthem ‘Ordinary Life’. It’s a philosophy that makes ‘Perpetual Motion People’, from beat pop opener to gospel closer, a constantly surprising and relentlessly melodic pleasure." NME